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It’s seen as a rite of passage for entrepreneurs – something you need to go through on your way to success.

This is a myth – and potentially a very dangerous one.

I failed at my first business, and it was one of the least pleasant experiences I’ve ever been through.

So don’t let motivational videos on YouTube fool you, the reality is that failing is painful, and should be avoided at all costs.

But if you’re living life at all and taking risks, there’s a good chance you will fail somewhere along the way. When it happens, you need a method for learning from it so you don’t keep repeating the same patterns in the future.

This post outlines some simple ideas for avoiding failure in the first place, and a straightforward exercise for learning from it when it happens.

It turns out one of the best ways to avoid failure is to take the opposite approach; to practice negative thinking. This involves anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them; before they happen.

When planning events, one of the first things I do is ask myself the question, ‘what’s the absolute worst possible thing that could go wrong here?’ or ‘If this event was to be a complete disaster, what would happen?’

Then I make a list of all the worst things that could possibly go wrong. E.g. The speaker doesn’t turn up (this happened), the air conditioning doesn’t work (this happened at an event in Barcelona – not pretty), an attendee has a food allergy, eats food and dies on site, etc.

Afterwards, I go through the list and jot down a solution for each of the problems that could occur. For the food allergy, my solution might be to email all the guests beforehand and ask if they have any food allergies, then I can let the catering company know in advance.

When you practice this, you can anticipate problems ahead of time, take actions to prevent them, and mitigate the damage should they occur.

Don’t get me wrong – you’ll never be able to predict everything that happens on the day, and things will go wrong. But the real reward of this exercise is the peace of mind it gives you knowing you’ve done everything in your power to prepare.

---- #2 – Learning from Others‘My prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.’ Charlie Munger

There’s a common saying in our culture:

‘You can only learn from experience.’

This is usually interpreted as ‘you can only learn from your own experiences.’

As a human being, you’ve got a very, very short amount of time on this planet; about eighty laps of the sun if you’re lucky.

I spent one of those laps ‘learning from my own experiences’ and it wasn’t fun. A year spent driving to farms at 5am to pick up potatoes, could have been spent in a more productive and enjoyable ways.

The saying that ‘you only learn from experience’ is true – but who says it has to be your experience?

Why not the experiences of others?

All it takes is the ability to ask questions, listen and write down the answers.

Before starting The Weekend University, I phoned someone I knew who had been involved in a similar organisation, and asked him some questions. From a ten-minute conversation, I learned that I was about to offer speakers 3x what this organisation paid theirs.

So, if you’re considering starting a business for example, it could be a worthwhile exercise to contact someone who has already started a similar business (not a direct competitor), and ask them some questions.​The goal is to learn from their mistakes – so you don’t have to make them too.

One conversation could save you a lot of time, money and egg on your face.

---- # 3 –Black Box Thinking“Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation. It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.” Matthew Syed

For the amount that it’s glorified, there’s nothing inherently good about failure.

In 1912, the airline industry was one of the most dangerous forms of transportation, with more than half of US Army pilots dying in crashes. In 2013, it’s the safest, with a rate of one accident per 2.4 million flights. You’re now more likely to die from a bee-sting than you are in plane crash.

Syed argues that the key to evolution in business and in our personal lives, is to model the airlines’ approach.

In every single airplane that has ever flown, a small indestructible black box has been kept on board. The purpose of the black box is to record the conversation in the cockpit, what the pilots were doing just before the crash, what systems failed, and any other factors that contributed to the plane going down.

When there's a crash, independent authorities open up the black box, analyse the information and dissect exactly what went wrong. The information is then disseminated to every single airline on the planet, new checklists are created and pilots are given up to date training. The result is that the same mistake never happens twice, and the airline industry gets safer with each new crash.

So if you have a failure in business, or in life, one of the most useful exercises you can do is open your own version of the ‘black box’, try to be objective as possible and dissect the experience.

Done properly, this can shed light on your strengths, weaknesses and provide invaluable information about what you need to do to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

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Contrary to popular opinion, failure is not some rite of passage you need to go through on your way to success.

Rather, it’s something you should do absolutely everything in your power to avoid.

Negative thinking and learning from the experiences of others are two simple ways to do that.

But if it does happen, one of the most important things you can do is open up your own version of the ‘black box’, be objective as you possibly can, and extract the lessons.

This way, each new failure benefits you in the long run, and you’ll never make the same mistake twice.